Chapter Forty-Seven

Research is like a galaxy, and every research lab is a different planet. Ginger’s was in an old medical facility containing many other labs, only a block away from the one-bedroom apartment where she now lived, thus making her world smaller and smaller. She had a tiny office nestled next to a slightly larger laboratory—all hers. She had a tech, a young woman named Sheila Huang, who was her research assistant, with whom she met every day; she had a fellow, this year a young man from Pakistan, who was paid by the fellowship program and thus was sort of free labor; and one or two days a week she herself did hands-on bench work. At nearly fifty, and established, Ginger was no longer a “lab rat.” She was the administrator. Her family, if they tried to understand her work at all, imagined her peering at a Bunsen burner, but it had been years since her fingers had touched anything like that.

Outside of her cluttered little unit, in the corridor, were files, and large machines filled with carbon dioxide that kept samples of tissue frozen—everyday cryogenics, really—until they were needed. A refrigerator held samples of blood. Across the hall and next door researchers were working on other kinds of cancer, following other leads. Three of those other labs were researching breast cancer, as she was.

Three afternoons a week Ginger worked at the oncology clinic in the hospital to help support her research projects. On weekends she was either in her lab or sequestered in her little office, struggling over the writing of articles for medical journals like The New England Journal of Medicine, describing her findings to keep herself known, and the rest of the time, during long days that ended at ten o’clock at night, she wrote applications for grants, to places like the National Institute of Health, or the Department of Defense. After all this time in medicine she was still working eighty hours a week, sixteen hours a day.

She told herself she was no different from the Wall Street types who put in those long hours; you had to be obsessed. After all, she was making $150,000 a year. She looked back at how she had begun her life’s work, with so much altruism and starstruck fantasy, and now most of the time she felt she was slogging through it as a beggar and a clerk.

Detail overwhelmed her. The applications and the work proposals and the budget were complex. It took three months to write a grant application, and they were judged very harshly. People had multiple grants, overlapping in duration, so they spent a lot of time obsessing over getting the next one. If you didn’t get the money you wouldn’t be able to continue the research, or have a salary to live on. Some people liked the routine and the challenge, the paperwork and anxiety, and some hated it. It had taken Ginger this long to realize she hated it. But it let her do the part she loved, to follow her dream of discovering something no one else had found. The one thing she had always been was stubborn.

She still had friends and colleagues, many of them one and the same because colleagues became friends and there was little time to keep up with the others. The married male doctor down the hall worked from six A.M. to six P.M. and thought that was an abbreviated day because he could go home to have supper with his children. He remarked that he hadn’t seen his children in the morning for years; not that it was a bad thing, he added, smiling. The young single people who worked in the labs, a transient group, amused her and kept her aware of the outside world, although she thought of them as an odd bunch, and she wondered if she had been odd too. Who would want to sit in a lonely room day after day doing repetitive work?

She was not sure now, looking back, if her lifelong dedication after polio had paralyzed her legs had been partly a way to remain hidden and to avoid being hurt.

She’d had lovers but not love; the love she’d had was so long ago now that she sometimes wondered what she had seen in him. Ginger was realistic, and she knew the chances of finding love now, of having a life’s companion, were remote. Would it have helped if she were desperate, if she wanted a man so much that she made seeking and getting him as much a project as she did finding a cure for cancer? But even able-bodied women in their twenties, out and about, looking, trying, complained they could never find a man to marry. What could she expect?

She had her habits by now and she was attached to them. She was a workaholic, and, in her few spare moments, she was the new term, a Couch Potato. Sometimes it made her content, a reward after taxing her brain, and sometimes she realized that she felt about her solitary life the same way she did about the administration duties: She hated it.

Holidays were the hardest. What would she do without her mother, Uncle Hugh and Teddy, her sisters, her nieces and nephew, her extended family filling up her mother’s house? They got her through Christmas, but New Year’s Eve was unspeakable, with or without plans, because she was always without a date. Even three-day weekends were depressing (throngs at sales in the stores, families struggling to airports to get away for a mini vacation), so Ginger always worked and ignored them.

Sometimes she felt guilty that she wasn’t trying to spend more time with her mother, who was getting older—eighty-seven, after all, was an age where you couldn’t put things off—but Rose seemed almost as busy as Ginger was, and certainly happier. Even Rose did not live alone. Peter and Jamie and their menagerie were a fixture and showed no sign of planning to leave, although Peter and Jamie had finally gotten married, in Las Vegas, of all bizarre places. They expressed no desire to have children. Children, Peter and Jamie said, would interfere with their perfect symbiosis.

So Peggy had no grandchildren . . . yet. There would always be Markie and Angel to reproduce, whenever they settled down. But Peggy’s voluntarily childless son, whom they all had underrated for so many years as a dilettante, had finally gotten his first novel published, to excellent reviews and a few weeks of exciting attention.

The other reason Ginger didn’t visit with her mother alone was that she knew Rose would sense that she was depressed, and wondered if Rose would suggest she give a salon again. But it was too late, there was no time, and she was, at least for now but perhaps forever, no longer the hostess type.

That year, 1987, Harriette’s husband, Julius, died of liver cancer. He had refused chemotherapy, which his doctors said wouldn’t add much length to his life, and he said he wanted to go peacefully and quickly, which he did. Harriette, who had always deferred to him, didn’t ask him to consider any other way.

After her husband died and she had recovered her good spirits, Harriette asked Ginger to come on a lecture cruise of the coast of Italy with her, which Ginger thought was like something out of a Victorian novel—the lively, elderly, rich, widowed aunt; the intelligent, crippled, spinster niece—and Ginger said she was too busy. “It will be good for you,” Aunt Harriette said. “You can afford it. What do you do with your money? You should have some fun. Life is short and unpredictable. You never know if an opportunity is your last.”

“Maybe some other time,” Ginger said. Maybe never, she thought. Aunt Harriette went with a friend.

Of course I know life is short and unpredictable, Ginger wanted to say. I work in a cancer clinic. Every time I see those terribly sick people I feel thankful I’m not them. And sometimes I see one or another, a nice-enough-looking man, no wife, who is going to get well, and I wonder if under different circumstances we would feel about each other in a more personal way. It’s unethical to date patients while they’re under your care, and then they’re gone, back to their real lives. Doctors marry patients, it’s true. I’ve seen it. Your patients depend on you, they need you so much, and it becomes a kind of emotion very like a crush. Then sometimes it happens that you go out with each other afterward, while the closeness is still there.

As the song goes: “But not for me.”

And yet sometimes she felt such a burst of joy, as if the unexpected love would sneak up on her if she only stopped thinking about it and let these things happen.

As the other song went: “Que Sera Sera.”